Wednesday, May 17, 2017

The 5'er

I have come to learn that a lot of people don’t know what a Fifth Wheel is. It is considered a trailer, but the hitch is in a truck bed. But you say, “You don’t have a truck.” Yup, you’re correct. We had it delivered to our site at Jojoba Hills. We don’t plan to tow it anywhere anytime soon. The Forza we told you about is our “travel rig”, just like many other Jojobians have.

Roger & I had been thinking about having a travel rig and a stationary rig for a while. The leaking in the Monaco just tipped our hand a little sooner than we planned. The advantage of our travel rig, as I had mentioned is that we can go places that a bigger rig can’t go. But I don’t think we could live full time in a rig that is only 35 feet long. Many people do, but we do like some space. However, by living part-time in our stationary rig, I think we can enjoy traveling for 6 or 7 months at a time plus taking a number of month-long trips each year.

So what did you get, you ask? A Heartland Newport. It is considered to be 42 feet long but that is from the rear to the hitch so it is really a couple of feet longer than that because there is space, i.e. our closet, in front of the hitch. There is also more space than the Monaco had because there is no cab space up front taking up room that you really can’t live in. However, Abby and Ziva would disagree with that because the dashboard is their favorite place to sit and watch what is going on in the world.

The room that we are sorely missing in the Forza is the half bath. Fortunately we have it in the 5th wheel. Another wonderful thing we have again is recliners in the form of theater seating, plus we also have comfortable seating for guests. It feels more like a house, a tiny house to be sure. Theoretically we have a dining table and chairs that can seat 4 people but it is pretty cramped. As you can see we again have the fake fireplace like we had in the Allegro, but we found that we really enjoy it. In fact we have one in both rigs.

The other thing we have is better access to our view of the Palomar Mountains. The back window views a tree but we decided to take advantage of that by adding bird and hummingbird feeders. We already have quite a few birds feeding, but no hummingbirds yet. We are told there are hummingbirds around Jojoba so we will wait and see.

Like everyone else we have been accumulating more stuff over time. You would think that with having 2 rigs plus a shed we would have plenty of room to store stuff, but somehow it didn’t work out that way. We do have extra room in the 5th wheel but it is mostly in hard to get to places. There is also extra room in the Forza right now but that will mostly be filled with stuff that comes from the 5th wheel--food, clothes, medicines and one-of-a-kind things that we need in both places depending upon where we are living at a given time. I’ve moved things out of the shed and into the rigs, but I’ve organized it more for craft work so I don’t have more storage space there. I am still doing some polymer clay and jewelry work but I also started decorating gourds. There is a gourd farm near Fallbrook which is our source of gourds and supplies. Like polymer clay, it is amazing the number of techniques one can learn and master. But I digress. Now I have to figure out what to do with my finished gourds.